The Big Games of the Intelligence Service: How China Crushed the CIA

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In two years, the Chinese intelligence services virtually destroyed the entire American intelligence network in the country. Dozens of illegal agents and their informants went to jail or were executed. In Washington, it is called the largest failure of the CIA in recent decades, and experts cannot understand on what and how the intelligence was pierced. And they fear that Beijing will share the information it has received with Moscow.

"Honey Badger" goes hunting

As China developed and turned into a powerful power, Washington watched more closely what was happening in that country. By the end of the last decade, the CIA had comprehensive information on the work of the Chinese government. It came straight from the corridors of power, where the Americans managed to introduce agents. Some of the informants were officials disenchanted with a state riddled with corruption. There were also those who were simply outbid.

But the flow of intelligence from the Middle Kingdom began to dry up, and in 2011, the CIA headquarters realized a very serious problem: sources of information disappeared one by one.

The American intelligence services have created a special group of especially valuable and high-ranking officials of the FBI and CIA. At a highly classified headquarters in Northern Virginia, they analyzed each operation, closely studying all the employees of the US Embassy in Beijing - regardless of diplomatic rank.

According to some reports, this operation was codenamed Honey Badger, which means "honey badger" (he is also a bald badger, or ratel, a rare exotic animal from the weasel family, a fearless and aggressive predator that has practically no natural enemies).

Betrayal or Hacking?

We considered two main versions. First, a mole has wound up in the bowels of American intelligence, which is leaking information about the intelligence network in China to Beijing. Second, Chinese hackers broke into an encrypted communication system.

Around the same time, PRC counterintelligence exposed a surveillance system organized by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from Taiwan. And CIA agents contacted an American student in Shanghai, Glenn Shriver, who was collecting defensive information for Chinese intelligence for money. For the edification of American students studying abroad, the FBI even released a video about Shriver's betrayal.

Comparing these facts, the investigators leaned towards the version about the mole. True, the most authoritative American counterintelligence officer Mark Kelton, who headed the group, doubted this. Perhaps partly because he was a close friend of CIA officer Brian Kelly, who was mistakenly suspected by the FBI of working for Russia in the 1990s.

But the second, "hacker" version was supported by the speed and accuracy with which the Chinese special services reached out to American informants. In addition, as the organizers of the intelligence network argued, not a single person in the United States, no matter how high the level of access to classified information he possessed, could have information at once about all the agents who were so successfully hunted by China.

Scent lost

In the course of the investigation, the picture loomed: having achieved notable success in China, the CIA officers relaxed, lost their vigilance and disregarded the rules of conspiracy. Agents in Beijing barely changed their routes and made secret meetings in the same places - just a gift from the surveillance network operating in the country. Some American intelligence officers talked to informers in restaurants that were under the hood of the secret services - where microphones were mounted at every table, and the waiters worked for counterintelligence.

In addition, the secret communication system Covcom, which was used by the agent network, according to experts, was very primitive, moreover, it was connected to the Internet. In fact, it copied the Middle East system, where the network environment is less dangerous. The abilities of the Chinese hackers were clearly underestimated. The investigation team conducted penetration tests and discovered that the system contained a fatal error: once logged in, one could gain access to a much wider secret communications system through which the CIA interacted with spy networks around the world.

This spy story was first reported by The New York Times in May last year. Anonymous officials at different times gave journalists different numbers of casualties - from 12 to 20 people. Then the number increased to 30 - as many agents and informants since 2010, American intelligence has lost in China. Some of the agents were evacuated from the country.

Mole, but not the same

In parallel, a version of the mole was also developed. In March 2017, it became known about the arrest of an employee of the State Department, Candice Kleinborn - during an interview with the investigation team, she kept silent about contacts with Chinese officials. Money came to her bank account from China, and Chinese officials showered her with gifts, including an iPhone, a laptop, a fully furnished apartment, and much more. But Kleinborn did not plead guilty, and they could not prove that she disclosed information about American agents.

In January this year, 53-year-old Jerry Chun Shin Li was detained at the New York airport. An ethnic Chinese citizen of the United States, he served in the American Armed Forces in the 1980s, and since 1994 he worked for the CIA, where he had access to classified documents. In 2007, he quit his job and went with his family to Hong Kong, got a job at an auction house, the co-owner of which is an influential Chinese party functionary.

All this time, the American special services watched him and in 2012 they were able to lure him out to the United States. Having searched the room in which he was staying, they found two notebooks: one with phone numbers and addresses, the other with detailed information about the CIA agents working undercover. It listed real names, dates of meetings with contacts, addresses of safe houses.

After five interrogations, Li was somehow kept free and allowed to return to Hong Kong. He was arrested only six years later, accused of stealing classified information. The investigation failed to find any evidence indicating that he passed information to the Chinese special services. In addition, the data found on him does not allow us to make an unambiguous conclusion that it was he who failed the American network in China.

The consequences are catastrophic

Betrayal, hackers, their own carelessness, or all of this taken together - the CIA and FBI do not know what exactly ruined the American intelligence network in China. They also don’t know how deeply the Chinese have penetrated the system of the American special services.

The CIA is particularly worried about whether Beijing shared this information, as well as access to Covcom, with Moscow. Just as the American intelligence network in China was collapsing, several agents working in Russia stopped communicating.

In any case, the failure is catastrophic. The United States admits that the restoration of the destroyed network will drag on for many years. Or not at all.

In terms of the number of losses, this failure of the CIA can only be compared with the failure of dozens of American agents in the USSR. Then it was all the fault of betrayal - the FBI officer Robert Hanssen and the head of the CIA counterintelligence unit Aldrich Ames handed over the American agents. Both were recruited by the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s.